Author: admin

When he became Burlington’s mayor in 1980, Bernie Sanders was a socialist outsider who had to face down a hostile political establishment. His successful mayoralty may contain lessons for Chicago’s new progressive mayor, Brandon Johnson.

Brandon Johnson (left), mayor of Chicago, at his swearing-in on May 15, 2023, and Bernie Sanders (right), then mayor of Burlington, in 1985. (Jacek Boczarski / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images) (Bettmann Archive / Getty Images)

He’s a political outsider running on a progressive platform who narrowly won a mayoral election against a well-connected, business-friendly, Republican-backed Democrat. His opponents are in hysterics. And now that he’s in office, he’ll have to face down a hostile political establishment, which will likely try to derail most of his proposed agenda for the city.

All of this describes the situation confronting Brandon Johnson, who was recently inaugurated after beating conservative Democrat Paul Vallas by a four-point margin to become Chicago’s newest mayor. But it also would have been an apt characterization of Burlington, Vermont, in 1980, when a young Bernie Sanders had just squeaked out a victory in his first mayoral campaign.

There are also, of course, many differences. Chicago in 2023, with a racially diverse population of 2.75 million, is a very different city, facing different opportunities and challenges, than the 38,000-person Burlington of the early 1980s. Johnson certainly has a much bigger and tougher task governing his city than Sanders did.

Still, some of what Sanders was up against as mayor of Burlington — and what he did to overcome fierce opposition — will be relevant to Johnson’s mayoralty. Here are a few lessons Johnson might take from Sanders’s “outsider” approach to governing as mayor.

Winning the Council Wars

Johnson’s campaign platform included support for “Treatment, Not Trauma,” which would reopen health clinics closed by former mayor Rahm Emanuel and send social workers and emergency medical technicians (EMTs) rather than police to address emergency mental health calls. Johnson has also called for $800 million in new taxes on the rich to fund generous investment in jobs, public schools, housing, and social services.

In trying to enact this program, Johnson is up against powerful foes. Most immediately, Johnson is likely to face strong opposition from more conservative members on the Chicago City Council itself. A worst-case scenario would be a repeat of the “council wars” under the progressive Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor, in which aldermen opposed to Washington organized to block all of the mayor’s initiatives.

Bernie Sanders dealt with council wars of his own after his first election victory. He improbably became Burlington’s first socialist mayor by winning with a razor-thin margin in a four-way race against longtime incumbent Gordon Paquette. (The original vote count had Sanders winning by twenty-two votes; a recount reduced that margin to ten.)

Paquette, a Democrat, had been in the mayor’s office since 1971; he largely deferred to business interests. “The urban renewal projects Paquette ended up supporting displaced communities and, combined with the county’s exploding population, raised rents and shrank the pool of available housing,” Branko Marcetic wrote of his tenure as mayor. “Meanwhile, as the city’s finances grew tighter, Paquette opted to cut services and fight demands for better pay and benefits from city employees.”

Sanders, like Johnson, had run a progressive campaign, with a platform of reducing property taxes, which he regarded as “regressive and unfair,” and shifting the tax burden to businesses and wealthier residents. (Johnson also pledged not to raise property taxes.) He additionally campaigned on rent control, opposing new developments that would displace low-income residents, and raising salaries for city workers.

Sanders, like Johnson, had run a progressive campaign, with a platform of reducing property taxes, which he regarded as ‘regressive and unfair,’ and shifting the tax burden to businesses and wealthier residents.

His victory shocked and dismayed the local Democratic Party establishment that had long dominated Burlington politics. The Democrats on the city council went to fairly extreme measures to try to limit Sanders to one term as mayor.

According to Sanders, when he took office in 1981, he had only two allies on the city council: Terry Bouricius, a fellow socialist who had won on the progressive Citizen Party line, and Sadie White, an independent. Then there were three Republicans and eight Democrats. Burlington’s city charter gave the mayor the authority to appoint various staff positions, but the Democrats and Republicans on the city council rejected all of Sanders’s appointees, and even fired the secretary he had just hired.

In his first book, Sanders recalled:

We were outflanked by the opposition on every major decision. The votes were always the same: eleven to two, the eight Democrats and three Republicans on one side, Terry and Sadie on the other.

The Democrats’ strategy was not too complicated: they would tie my hands, make it impossible for me to accomplish anything, then win back the mayor’s office by claiming that I had been ineffective.

Faced with opposition like this, a different sort of politician might have abandoned his progressive platform and attempted to mollify his opponents, hoping to at least be able to score some minor achievements. But this is not what Sanders did.

Instead, he and his supporters devised a plan to oust his opponents on the city council and replace them with allies. They began building a third party in all but legal status, aiming to win a Sanders-supportive majority on the city council and change the balance of power in Burlington politics. The group was initially called the Independent Coalition; later it was known as the Progressive Coalition, and it eventually became the dominant force in city politics and the beginning of the statewide Vermont Progressive Party.

Sanders and his supporters quickly began organizing for the next alderman elections, in 1982, when they ran candidates in six of the city’s wards. A vigorous campaign through the winter of 1981–82, in which the Independent Coalition indicted the Democratic and Republican candidates for hamstringing the mayor’s agenda, produced a record-high turnout for Burlington city council elections. The coalition ended up winning three out of the six seats, giving the progressives five aldermen total and forcing Sanders’s opponents to negotiate with him; the Democrats and Republicans finally let Sanders appoint an administration.

On this score, at least, Johnson is perhaps beginning his mayoralty on more favorable terrain than Sanders. Johnson’s agenda will likely have the support of much of Chicago’s city council members backed by the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), which totals about two-fifths of aldermanic seats, including the six occupied by Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)–backed councilmembers.

Johnson himself is a product of the militant CTU. For the past decade, the CTU has been building an independent, member-based political organization, United Working Families (UWF), that backs defenders of public education and other working-class causes. (In addition to Johnson, UWF has elected a number of aldermen, county commissioners, and Illinois state legislators, as well as one member of Congress, Representative Delia Ramirez.)

Along with other growing left groups like DSA, UWF has the potential to be the beginning of a party-like alternative to the neoliberal Democratic Party establishment in Chicago. If and when Johnson does face opposition to his platform on the city council, whether he succeeds will depend on his ability to maintain and expand the legislative coalition around these groups, including by primarying his neoliberal opponents and empowering allies.

Recently, Johnson appointed five members of the Democratic Socialist Caucus to be city council committee chairs. Socialist alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa in particular “will not only lead the powerful Zoning Committee but also serve as Johnson’s floor leader, making [him] the most powerful member of the City Council,” as Heather Cherone reported for WTTW. This is a hopeful sign. Johnson also appointed a former Lori Lightfoot and Rahm Emanuel staffer as his own chief of staff, but progressives appear to dominate Johnson’s major cabinet positions thus far.

Aggressive Executive Action and Opening Up City Government

That’s not to say that Johnson needs to wait for future elections to deal with aldermanic opposition. Again, Sanders’s fraught first year in office might hold a lesson, when the new mayor tried to do whatever he could without the city council’s support.

With his staff appointments blocked, Sanders set up his own informal cabinet of advisers, with which he organized a number of task forces to come up with ideas for what the city should do. His aim, he says — in line with the slogan of “Not Me, Us” that he popularized during his presidential campaigns — was to “democratize Burlington politics and open up city government to all the people.”

Some of these task forces were eventually incorporated into the city government officially, but before that they acted as a kind of “parallel government,” Sanders says. These task forces included what became the Burlington Women’s Council, for instance, bringing together a diverse group of women’s organizations, which introduced legislation on a variety of issues affecting women from domestic violence protections to job training for low-income women in male-dominated fields.

Sanders also began cleaning up municipal corruption by introducing competitive bidding for companies that were doing business with the city, which saved the government tens of thousands of dollars per year. In addition, Sanders and supporters began organizing cultural and recreational activities for the city, to demonstrate that government could improve people’s lives: they began a Little League program in Burlington’s poorest neighborhood and started a popular summer concert series on the city’s waterfront that attracted thousands of attendees and brought in entertainers from around the world.

These popular initiatives no doubt aided Sanders and the Progressive Coalition in boosting turnout and shifting Burlington’s balance of power in subsequent elections, first in the city council race and then in the 1982 mayoral campaign. Sanders boasts that, between the mayoral election in 1979 preceding his first campaign and his first reelection campaign, turnout nearly doubled, from seven thousand to 13,320. Support for Sanders and the Progressives was concentrated in lower-income and working-class wards, where he won nearly 70 percent of the vote in 1983.

Brandon Johnson can also build popular support for his agenda and the coalition behind him by creatively using executive action and promoting government participation. Johnson issued a handful of executive orders immediately upon being sworn in, including one that “instructs the Office of Budget and Management to prepare an analysis of all resources in the City’s FY2023 budget that are available to fund youth employment and enrichment programs” and another establishing a deputy mayor of labor relations, tasked with “improving working conditions, advancing new job opportunities for employment, and protecting workers’ rights,” among other responsibilities. The executive orders also created similar positions for immigrant rights and community safety.

Brandon Johnson can also build popular support for his agenda and the coalition behind him by creatively using executive action and promoting government participation.

Hopefully, Johnson will continue using his mayor’s pen to expand the remit of city government and fulfill his campaign promises wherever possible. Doing so may be necessary to get around potential intransigence on the city council, as it was for Sanders, and help Johnson rally and energize his supporters.

Building Power Outside City Hall

The opposition to Johnson will not just come from the city council, of course. Immediately after he won, Bloomberg ran a report quoting financial and business executives voicing serious concerns about the incoming mayor’s plans to impose new taxes; these executives are more or less threatening a capital strike. Meanwhile, John Catanzara, president of Chicago’s Lodge 7 of the Fraternal Order of Police, said before Johnson’s victory that there would be “blood in the streets,” predicting that police would leave the force en masse if Johnson won.

Neutralizing the threat of capital flight or a police strike will mean mobilizing supporters for their own disruptive strikes and protests, to force capitalists and rogue elements within the state (like the police union) to accept the need for progressive reforms. Johnson got his start in the CTU, where he was a rank-and-file organizer who helped transform the union into the militant force it became, leading the counterattack on the school privatization movement and demonstrating the effectiveness of strikes that speak to the concerns of teachers and the broader public they serve. That background, and his base among CTU workers and supporters, means that he is well positioned to lead the kind of mass mobilization and organization that will be required to overcome capitalist and police resistance to his program.

Johnson could, for instance, use his bully pulpit to support and encourage strikes by CTU and other unions in support of his program. Should protests against inequality and police violence break out as they did in the summer of 2020, Johnson could use the moment to push for badly needed reforms — and refrain from going to war with protesters as former mayor Lori Lightfoot did, raising bridges across the city and shutting down public transportation to try to stop the demonstrations. To mitigate capitalists’ structural leverage over the economy, Johnson can encourage nonunionized workers to organize and start democratizing municipal finance through establishing a public bank.

How Johnson ultimately governs will in part be a function of what kind of public pressure he faces from CTU and other activists and social movements. Even Sanders was not immune to compromising in the face of business’s power. In his first year, he angered environmentalists by greenlighting a wood-chip burning plant that later caused “long-term environmental issues for the city,” according to Marcetic. And activists claim that the city’s large public waterfront beautification project, for which Sanders has long taken credit, would have been blighted by high-rise condos and a hotel if not for public opposition. It was only because activists helped kill Sanders’s original, more business-friendly proposal, they say, that much of the waterfront has been reserved for public use.

Nevertheless, Sanders’s tenure in Burlington is largely a testament to the power of a mayor who governed by the principle “Not Me, Us,” and the strength of the movement behind him. Sanders served as mayor for four terms, until 1989. He and his supporters notched a number of victories, including establishing more progressive revenue sources, like higher taxes on commercial property; raising pay for city workers; funding community land-trust housing, upgrading public housing, and passing tenants’ rights legislation; and important environmental wins, including upgrading the city’s sewer system, shutting down an “environmentally unsound” landfill, and preventing construction of a proposed trash-burning plant.

The economic and political opposition to Brandon Johnson as mayor of Chicago is sure to be much more intense. If he proves himself somehow able to withstand these pressures, it will be because he helped organize working people to confront the capitalist economic and political establishment head on. That will be needed to significantly redistribute power and wealth from corporations to Chicago’s working class — and, as it was for Sanders and his allies, it could be the start of a broader transformation of politics across his state and the country.

Amid a historic upsurge of worker militancy in 1960s Italy, communist composer Luigi Nono turned his efforts to dramatizing the plight of exploited factory employees. The result was musically groundbreaking, and beloved by the workers who inspired it.

Two workers pouring the cast steel from the ladle into the ingot maker at the Cornigliano Steelworks, 1963. The Cornigliano metalworkers were the inspiration for Luigi Nono’s composition La fabbrica illuminata. (Mondadori via Getty Images).

It’s a common prejudice that working people are less able to appreciate “culture” in the form of high art. The avant-garde is for the upper classes; workers and the poor should just be left to enjoy their Top 40 hits and the next Marvel Cinematic Universe or Star Wars spinoff.

The story of the 1964 art music composition La fabbrica illuminata (The Illuminated Factory), by the Italian modernist composer and Communist Party member Luigi Nono, is a beautiful refutation of this trope. Nono’s work was directly inspired by, and drew from, his observations of and interviews with Genoese steelworkers; and the workers whose plight Nono dramatized were themselves enraptured by his experimental piece, which was both politically and musically challenging.

The early ’60s were a tumultuous time for the relatively young Republic of Italy, which celebrated one hundred years as a unified nation-state in 1961. That same year, the country marked only fifteen years as a true republic since the overthrow of the fascist government in 1946. Italy’s economy had grown steadily since World War II thanks to rapid industrialization powered by significant public investment from the Italian government — a phenomenon called the “economic miracle.” In the largely agricultural south, however, lack of education and poor wages contributed to financial hardships that invited organized crime and institutional corruption.

Many agricultural workers responded by migrating north, chasing the perceived prosperity of industrial centers like Turin, Milan, and Genoa. The economic miracle saw some 1.3 million farmers abandon the south in favor of dangerous, low-paying jobs in auto manufacturing and metal work. Though the industrialized north fared a little better economically, it still suffered from neofascist terrorist attacks and expansive corporate greed, on top of a growing “new mafia” that feasted on increased demand for drugs, alcohol, and tobacco brought on by rapid urbanization and corporate commerce.

To this new criminal element, every emerging market was an indispensable source of income. Fledgling workers’ coalitions from north to south found themselves the targets of organized crime, as well as of the traditional pallbearers of capital like the national police, corrupt judicial courts, and international lobbyists. The capitalists, for their part, fought against union-won wage raises with price increases to maintain their profit margins, diverting investment to real estate speculation, and state suppression of union action.

The Italian workers moved sharply left, and a wave of strikes erupted throughout the Italian north between 1959 and 1963. This period marked the most vigorous labor militancy Italy had ever seen, only trumped by the “Hot Autumn” strikes of 1969–1972 in labor hours lost, according to labor historian Roberto Franzosi.

In June of 1960, a group of Genoese workers called a general strike to stand with students and citizens alike to expel a neofascist conference attempting to organize in the city. A performance of Arrigo Boito’s Mefistofele was canceled in March of 1964 when over four thousand opera workers struck for higher wages. Later in July, thirty thousand railroad workers shut down railways in Rome for weeks, demanding higher wages and improved benefits.

Perhaps the most important of these labor actions was the 1963 FIAT wildcat strike, which saw 6,200 men defy union leadership with an impromptu work stoppage. The workers were frustrated with concessions the union had made on their behalf, and with problems outside of work like soaring rent prices and subpar living conditions. This strike quickly grew to over one hundred thousand auto workers across Turin and helped popularize the idea of the working class in Italy as an independent political bloc.

This message caught and held the attention of Luigi Nono, then an emerging voice for communism and the third world within the European avant-garde. Nono, born in 1924, grew up a committed anti-fascist, and became a communist during his university years in Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Italy. Nono’s approach to music and politics took after Antonio Gransci’s idea of the “organic intellectual,” an artist or thinker who advocates for the interests of the working class against capitalist and imperialist influence in academia, the arts, and government. Rather than pursue art solely for art’s sake, the organic intellectual sees art as a class effort.

Nono saw a path toward establishing a working-class cultural presence through music. He made it clear that his motives were not to write music for himself, but for the laboring class: “The relationship between the creator and the masses must no longer be those of professor to pupil, of initiator to neophyte. They must find themselves at the origin of the work.” Accessibility and direct messaging were central to Nono’s understanding of art.

Nono was a composer for whom the act of music making was itself a political act, if not a transcendental one. But music didn’t simply complement working-class agitation. To Nono, making subversive music was no less revolutionary than hucking projectiles at riot police — and he did both. Contemplating the role of the revolutionary musician, he said that one needs “spiritual order, artistic discipline, and a clarity of insight . . . [to be] a revolutionary with a clear idea of the situation in which he finds himself who is thus able to bring down existing structures to make way for existing structures that are growing up in their place.” It was with this penchant for tearing down structures that he turned his eye on Cornigliano, a western district of Genoa.

The Strike as Musical Inspiration

In May of 1964, over forty thousand metalworkers in Cornigliano walked off the job. Many more steel- and ironworkers declared strikes throughout Italy, leaving only a handful of foundries operational and crippling the country’s manufacturing sector. Topping the workers’ demands was a rejection of productivity agreements and a rise in living and working standards — the Cornigliano steelworks had some of the most dangerous working conditions in Northern Italy at the time. The uproar was widespread and captured the nation’s attention.

Nono scholar Jonathan Impett writes:

It seemed that while their government was helping near-monopoly companies create unprecedented wealth, Italian workers saw no rise in their living standards but ever-harsher working conditions. They felt treated by their employers with state-sponsored contempt; German steelworkers earned twice as much.

When another set of strikes was scheduled for June, Nono saw a window of opportunity. He and a team of collaborators had been working on a massive piece titled Da un diario italiano, a composition that would synthesize quotes from Sicilian workers, excerpts from Fidel Castro’s Second Declaration of Havana, and writings by the anti-fascist poet Cesare Pavese. The work was to be set in six scenes depicting Italy’s recent history; this six-movement structure wasn’t dissimilar from a Bach cantata, a composer who Nono drew on repeatedly for the project.

Each scene was connected to a world event but was described without specific reference to historical details. Nono likely chose this route in order to avoid censorship and make the work approachable, while maintaining the piece’s political message. The Holocaust became “human oppression,” the worker’s condition became “nightmare,” fascism became “violence,” Italy after fascism became “joy,” the nuclear arms race became “catastrophe,” a humanist rediscovery of mankind’s good — “life returning.”

The result was a haunting, inhuman work of industrialized music, exhibiting the macabre reality of life as a slave to the foundries.

Five movements came easily enough given the composer’s chosen source material. But the second movement, “nightmare,” seemed to demand connection to the historical moment. It was while plotting out this second movement that Nono began to consider the strikes at Genoa as a source for musical inspiration.

In May, Nono had received an invitation from the Radiotelevisione italiana (RAI) to write a piece for the September Prix Italia, one of the most significant radio art contests in Europe. That year’s Prix Italia would be held in Genoa, the perfect audience for the debut of the second movement of Un diario. Nono, along with his collaborators, sound engineer Marino Zuccheri and writer Giuliano Scabia, packed their recording equipment and set off for the Cornigliano Steelworks.

The trio was welcomed onto the campus by workers who were eager to guide them on their sound rummage. To Nono, it was not a safari to ogle at workers in pity, but a study of reactions and the human condition. “I was shocked not just by the seemingly fantastic acoustic and visual spectacle . . . but really by the violence with which I was struck by the reality of the complex conditions of the workers in those places.” The three gathered any sound they could find, from the roar of the blast furnace to lunchtime conversations with the workers who risked their lives to fuel it.

They returned to their studio in Venice invigorated for the project yet horrified by the conditions they had witnessed. Nono’s Prix Italia submission was to be an excerpt of the fully realized second movement, set to existing text by Scabia. He would call it La fabbrica illuminata. For this standalone work, he would stage a lone soprano with reactive magnetic tape, a much more intimate — and confrontational — setting than Un diario.

The result was a haunting, inhuman work of industrialized music, exhibiting the macabre reality of life as a slave to the foundries. Opening on the line, “The factory of death, they call it,” the soprano acts as a sort of Virgil through the processes of alienation and dehumanization. As was the case with the Cornigliano steelworkers, she never really has control over the dialogues that play out around her. By the end of the work, her own recorded sounds from the beginning are brought back — now disfigured and consolidated with the hellish chorus of factory noise and the work cries of laborers. No longer her own voice, she belongs to the factory.

The audience is transported to the material sound-space of the steelworks and to the soprano’s personal world of suffering. This unification of factory, performer, and audience is not accidental. Nono’s goal here was to give the audience a work with “no camouflage . . . no popular or populist naturalism.” The brilliance here lies in the confrontation: a work of high art that assaults the audience so directly that it creates a monologue, from alienated worker to captive listener.

La fabbrica illuminata wouldn’t premiere in Genoa, however. Italian authorities found the work too subversive for the political climate in the industrial center, fearing a state-sponsored event that could provoke thousands of already agitated workers (this would not be the last time Nono would be censored by the state). Instead, Nono premiered it at the independent Venice Biennale in late September.

The work was an immediate success with the patrons most important to Nono, the metalworkers themselves, who insisted that he return to the factory for another performance. When he obliged, the composer found an audience who, contrary to stereotype, had a deep interest in art music. The foundry workers were eager to understand the artistic process and its applications: “[They asked] very concrete questions, but also very serious and deep, not ideological hot air.” The Italian workers were not only capable of but hungry for “highbrow” cultural engagement.

By valuing the interests of the working class over the aesthetic sensibilities of the upper classes, Nono made a strong case for art music as a revolutionary tool. But his concern with the situation of the exploited factory worker is also what inspired him to break new musical ground — showing that the plight of the oppressed can be material not just for propaganda, but for transcendent art of a kind that can be appreciated by people of all classes.

On Friday morning, tragedy struck near the Groom Creek area in Arizona, when a randomly unprovoked bear attack resulted in the death of resident Steven Jackson, 66.

According to the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office the bear attacked and killed Jackson as he was outside drinking coffee on his property where he is currently building a home.

The bear dragged Jackson approximately 75 feet down an embankment, despite neighbors’ attempts to deter the animal with shouts and car horns. One of the neighbors managed to get a rifle and shoot the bear. Still, unfortunately, Jackson had already passed away due to his injuries.

The Arizona Game and Fish Department expresses that the incident is highly unusual, not having had a similar attack since the mid-1980s. Upon inspection, nothing was found on the site that would have provoked the bear such as food or water.

Officials believe that the animal’s aggression was potentially a “predatory response,” but the cause of this response is unknown. Sheriff David Rhodes of Yavapai County expressed deep sadness and sympathy to Jackson’s family, and the county is actively investigating the incident.

Officials ask residents not to shoot bears unless they detect an imminent threat.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

Click the share button above to email/forward this article …

The post ESG Dystopia: Why Corporations Are Doubling Down on Woke Even As They Lose Billions appeared first on Global Research.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu below the author’s name or on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at …

The post The Fourth Industrial Revolution: The Future of AI, The Past of Homo Sapiens? appeared first on Global Research.

Post Content

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

Click the share button above to email/forward this article …

The post Turbo Lung Cancer: 24-Year-Old UK Paramedic Coughed Up Blood and Died Within Five Months of Stage 4 Lung Cancer Diagnosis appeared first on Global Research.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

Click the share button above to email/forward this article …

The post Video: Ukraine Is Harvesting Children’s Organs in Adrenochrome Labs appeared first on Global Research.

First published on May 20th, 2016

Laissez faire was planned, explained Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation: The origins of the market system go back to the intentional project of institutional transformation initiated in England in the 19th century, establishing …

The post June 14, Kari’s 100th Birthday: The Importance of Karl Polanyi’s Analysis to Understanding Current Neoliberalism appeared first on Global Research.

While Suncor has failed to make basic improvements to a Commerce City, Colorado, refinery that is polluting the area, the company has massively increased payouts to shareholders — at the urging of one of the world’s largest hedge funds.

Suncor oil refinery in Commerce City, Colorado, on January 3, 2023. (Hyoung Chang / the Denver Post)

An oil refinery is poisoning the air in Colorado due to poor maintenance and inspection, according to a new report from federal environmental regulators. But instead of devoting money to deal with the problems, the refinery’s owner, Suncor Energy, has massively increased payouts to shareholders — at the urging of one of the world’s largest hedge funds.

The case illustrates how Wall Street’s investments in fossil fuels directly threatens the health of local residents and, in particular, vulnerable populations.

The Canadian oil and gas giant Suncor has made headlines in recent years for a series of chemical releases and air quality violations at its ninety-two-year-old refinery just outside Denver. In its new report, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found that the problems are systemic.

“The Suncor petroleum refinery in Commerce City, Colorado, may experience more air quality incidents because of inadequacies in preventative maintenance, testing and inspection of liquid level control systems and electrical equipment,” the EPA declared last week.

The inadequacies persist despite repeated fines and investigations from state and federal regulators. While Suncor has failed to make basic improvements to the refinery’s procedures and staffing, the company has delivered more than $12 billion to shareholders since the start of 2022.

In response to aggressive pressure from Elliott Management, a hedge fund headed by the Republican mega-donor and ruthless speculator Paul Singer, Suncor last year increased its stock buybacks by more than 120 percent to $5.1 billion, and its dividends by 67 percent to $2.6 billion.

Suncor and Elliott did not respond to our requests for comment.

Taken from Suncor’s 2022 annual report.

Poison for Profit

Suncor — a $39 billion company based in Calgary, Alberta — operates the only major refinery in Colorado. The facility is based in Commerce City, a low-income Denver suburb that has a large Hispanic population.

The Denver area has the sixth-worst air quality among US cities for ozone, a pollutant that damages the tissue of the respiratory tract and is correlated with a high incidence rate of asthma and decreased respiratory functions. Air quality advocates say that Suncor’s refinery has been a significant contributor to the region’s dangerously high ozone levels.

“It doesn’t surprise me that Suncor is choosing their dividends and profits despite the harm they have caused to our community,” said Ean Tafoya, a Denver-based environmental activist. “It’s time for a just transition — planned retirement for this facility and for remediation. Not only do communities get poisoned, they are also locking us into long-term climate change. I’m disgusted that we have a system that allows oil companies to do this, even though they lied to the public about the dangers of climate change.”

In May, state health officials sent out alerts to Commerce City residents near the refinery directing them to close their doors and windows and stay inside after an accidental toxic chemical release by Suncor, for the second time in a month. Commerce City residents typically avoid drinking the tap water due to the impacts of the Suncor refinery.

Suncor has been repeatedly fined for safety and health violations at its facilities in the United States, generating more than $6.5 million in penalties since 2008, according to data reviewed by us. That includes a record $4 million in fines for air quality violations issued by Colorado environmental regulators in 2020 for the Commerce City refinery.

As Suncor poisoned the community, the firm increased its dividends after Elliott Management, a $55 billion hedge fund, launched a pressure campaign last year targeting the company’s management — and specifically, the company’s decision to cut its dividend shortly after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the firm was facing a multibillion dollar quarterly loss.

Elliott and other so-called activist hedge funds employ a similar playbook: they purchase a block of stock and then target a company’s management and seek to cut costs and increase dividends and stock buybacks, generating profits for the firm and other shareholders.

As part of its campaign, the hedge fund declared that Suncor’s dividend reduction “shook investor confidence.”

Elliott’s campaign materials further called on Suncor to “increase capital return to shareholders from 50 to 80 percent of discretionary cash flow after dividends,” and asserted that stock buybacks — when a company repurchases its own stock from shareholders to artificially drive up share prices — would be an “attractive use of capital.”

Since the start of Elliott’s campaign, Suncor has significantly increased its dividends and stock buybacks. The company repurchased $5.1 billion in stock last year, according to its annual report, up from $2.3 billion in 2021.

Elliott has now appointed four of the thirteen members of the company’s board of directors, despite holding just 0.75 percent of the outstanding shares of the company, suggesting that Elliott’s slash-and-burn tactics have support from the company’s major shareholders, which mainly include mutual funds like Dodge & Cox and the Royal Bank of Canada’s asset-management arm.

Mutual funds typically invest in a broad range of stocks, paying investors reliably higher dividends, and usually don’t interfere in the companies in which they invest.

Archived Elliott Management Website, RestoreSuncor.com

While Elliott attacked Suncor’s safety record as part of its shareholder campaign, the company’s efforts to boost Suncor’s payouts to shareholders means the company has less money to invest in the workers and technology it needs to resolve the air quality problems identified by the EPA.

These problems appear to be part of a pattern. The EPA’s report on the consistent inadequacies at Suncor’s Commerce City refinery follows the company’s 2020 settlement with the state over more than one hundred air quality violations at the facility.

In March 2020, Suncor entered into a $9 million settlement with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) over the refinery, the largest penalty against a single facility in state history. Of that sum, $4 million went toward fines and community projects, while $5 million was reserved for a consulting company to investigate problems at the facility.

That consultant’s report was partially used by the EPA to come to its sweeping conclusions about the safety of the Suncor refinery. According to the EPA, “from 2016–2020, Suncor had the greatest number of tail gas incidents that caused releases of excess sulfur dioxide,” compared to eleven other refineries. State permits for the Suncor refinery in Commerce City were repeatedly delayed after they expired, allowing the refinery to operate unpermitted. The EPA vetoed an initial permit from the CDPHE last March, before issuing a revised permit in September with expanded monitoring and toxic chemical release disclosure requirements.

You can subscribe to David Sirota’s investigative journalism project, the Lever, here.